[antisthenes]

This can't possibly have anything to do with utilitarianism as it is impossible for us to understand domesticated animal utility preference curves beyond "being fed and warm = good". If one is being pedantic, I'm sure one could find many wild species which fare will in confinement, and make a case that it is cruel to contain wild animals in cases where utility from our entertainment does not outweigh their dis-utility from being imprisoned (such as zoos). I'm not convinced that such an argument could be made for domesticated or feral animals.

Utilitarianism is primarily about maximizing utility of a wide spectrum of the population as it pertains to humans and societies and has nothing to do with animals, wild or domestic except for the utility they provide humanity with.

Negative utilitarianism separated from the general concept of utilitarianism is, of course, a nonsense concept in and of itself, since its end goal is non-existence, which makes utility unable to exist.

I'm not familiar with other pseudo-think tanks, so I'll defer to you on that one.

[deontologizt]

> Utilitarianism is primarily about maximizing utility of a wide spectrum of the population as it pertains to humans and societies and has nothing to do with animals, wild or domestic except for the utility they provide humanity with.

Actually, utilitarianism is about maximizing the welfare (i.e., happiness minus suffering) of all beings that can be said to have a "welfare". This goes back to the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, who argued that any being capable of suffering deserves moral consideration. (more extensive discussion can be found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism) More recently, the most prominent living utilitarian philosopher is Peter Singer, who has argued extensively for the moral consideration of animals. Utilitarianism in the philosophical sense is distinct from the anthropocentric economic interpretation.